Character: B.L. Zebub

Mandatory Intramural Slo-Pitch

The idea for this part of the story originally came from that early episode of The Office where the office plays basketball against the warehouse. The plan for it in the third issue of Hell, Inc. was to be a dodgeball game, because I played in a dodgeball league and thought that would be more fun to draw. During the revamp of the series as a webcomic, I changed it to slo-pitch for two reasons: 1. baseball sucks, so of course that’s what they play in Hell, and 2. when I worked as a teacher, it was mandatory that I help with an outside-of-school activity, and ended up “coaching” softball. I wanted to use that complete lack of interest in something that I was forced to do for something other than arranging all skill demonstrations so I didn’t have to actually throw or catch or bat.

EMPLOYEE OF THE WEEK:

Cindy Gauthier is the Employee of the Week. She also draws things, so you should check out her work, including her debut comic Posthumous. If you want to be Employee of the Week and get a shout-out in an upcoming comic post, Check out the Hell, Inc. Patreon. It helps keep me drawing Hell, Inc. strips instead of being buried in freelance work, which is a win-win for everybody. Incidentally, I am currently posting this from under the mountain of freelance inking that I’ll be doing for the next few weeks. Good thing I have a buffer of strips!

As always, if you’d like to support Hell, Inc. but capitalism has squeezed all of your spare cash out of you, you can vote for Hell, Inc. on Top Webcomics! Top Webcomics has been the best resource for gaining new readers, and more votes = more new readers seeing the comic! Click the banner below to vote!

Next Week: Mandatory Intramural Overtime! Read it first on Patreon!

Summoned

There tend to be gaps in drawing Hell, Inc. strips. Typically I’ll draw 3-5 strips in a week or 10 days, then have to take a break to work on something else – commissions, other comics, boring business stuff, etc. Sometimes those breaks are short. If I’m doing a commission, for example, it might only take a day or two. Other times, those breaks are pretty long, like the two months I spent drawing pages for the new GWAR: The Enormogantic Fail graphic novel. The first strip I draw when I come back from a break is always an interesting experience. Aside from reacquainting myself with storytelling in the horizontal format, how I draw the characters and how I approach the compositions is always a little different. That’s mostly due to art being a skill that evolves over time – when I do a different project, I learn new things and hone skills I already have, so when I come back to something that I’ve worked on over a long period of time, my technique is a bit different. This is all a more-detailed-than-necessary lead-up to saying that starting with a bird’s eye view of the office, where there are many characters and a whole bunch of background objects, was perhaps a more challenging choice than it needed to be.

EMPLOYEE OF THE WEEK:

The Employee of the Week section is back to normal, post-Kickstarter. BUT, we do have a nice segue between the two, as I welcome new patron Barrie Deatcher, who is also a Kickstarter backer. Welcome, Barrie, and also welcome to the new readers that have discovered the comic as a result of the Kickstarter. If you want to be Employee of the Week, support Hell, Inc. on Patreon – it’s how I keep money coming in so I can cut down on the amount of freelance work I need to take on. Given the amount of freelance work I’ve done this year, it is not working haha.

Another great way to support Hell, Inc. is by upvoting it on Top Webcomics. It’s been the largest source of new readers by a pretty substantial margin, and higher rankings = more new readers. Click on the banner to vote, and make a habit of it – you can vote once a day!

Next Week: Everything that is fun is also mandatory, right? That makes sense. Read it early on Patreon!

Ghost Butts

Sometimes I get to do really stupid things in a comic, and those are almost always my favourite things. For example, using the phrase “ghost butts” in a dramatic context. I also sometimes forget to update the comic on Monday morning because I forget what day it is, which is what happened today. It turns out going to an outdoor concert for like 8 hours on a Friday really screws up my sense of what day it is. On the plus side, I got to see GWAR, Slayer, and Disturbed from the VIP section, so that ruled.

Speaking of music, I’m putting together a Spotify playlist for Hell, Inc. If you’ve got music suggestions for it that fit with the theme of the comic, leave a comment here or hit me up on Twitter.

EMPLOYEE OF THE WEEK:

This week’s Employee of the Week is Brien Aronov! He, along with the other Patreon patrons, will be getting access to a cool piece of Hell, Inc. short fiction written by my partner Caitlin. I’m continuing my efforts to figure out how to overhaul the Patreon to make it more appealing and provide more content without taking away from time spent on the actual comic. You can support those efforts by chipping in a few bucks to the Hell, Inc. Patreon, which keeps the lights on over here (sort of literally, the Patreon money tends to go directly to bills).

As always, supporting Hell, Inc. for free is also appreciated – go upvote Hell, Inc. on Top Webcomics to bring in new readers.

Next Week: How to make a riot riot-ier. That’s a word now, shut up. Check it out early on Patreon.

Satan Give Me Health Insurance

I feel like Satan Give Me Health Insurance merch might do really well. Thoughts? Is that something you’d be interested in? I’ve been kicking around a bunch of ideas for Hell, Inc. merch, but I haven’t been able to get a good handle on what I think people would actually want. In art-related news, the third panel was a nightmare to colour. There are at least three layers of different shades of green creating the miasma of horrors that is B.L. Zebub’s computer usage.

EMPLOYEE OF THE WEEK:

Joe Amon is Employee of the Week! Please make good use of the Employee of the Week parking spot. If you want to be Employee of the Week, or just help add some stability to my financial health, which allows me to do the comic, donate to the Hell, Inc. Patreon page.

As always, supporting Hell, Inc. for free is also appreciated – go upvote Hell, Inc. on Top Webcomics. Readership has expanded substantially since the comic has been on Top Webcomics, and that all comes from your votes boosting it up the rankings for better visibility.

Next Week: Gas leak. Read it early by supporting Hell, Inc. on Patreon!

The Chase

And now, this week’s REAL comic, after yesterday’s April Fools post. You can see the stylistic changes pretty clearly. Aside from the obvious addition of colour, the shapes are a lot more defined and polished.

I also had to be a lot more inventive with the panel layout, since the traditional nine panel grid doesn’t really translate to a strip. The nine panel grid is really ideal for this kind of moment, though, because it has such a strong feeling of moment-to-moment continuity. It’s like a film camera cutting from shot to shot rapidly.

EMPLOYEE OF THE WEEK:
Brien Aronov is Employee of the Week! Things over at the Hell, Inc. Patreon are getting a revamp over the next month or so, partly because I learned that post scheduling was an option. Check out the page to see the first Guintern Newsletter and learn about my office guinea pigs and their perspectives on the business of cartooning. Patreon helps me take less freelance work, which means more time spent focusing on the comics you’re already interested in – it’s pretty much a win-win situation. If everyone who read the comic yesterday threw in a buck, it would cover my mortgage payment. That’s how big of a difference it can make.

Want to help out, but can’t afford to contribute to the Patreon? I get it, late capitalism sucks. So here’s a new, FREE way to help boost Hell, Inc.’s readership and help it stay viable! Click on the banner below to vote for Hell, Inc. on the Top Webcomics list. The farther up the rankings Hell, Inc. gets, the more traffic gets driven to the comic. You can vote once per day, so check it out!

Next Week: We return to the normal Monday update, and Doug returns to the loving embrace of the Hellevator. Patrons can read it early!

Canadian Standoff

This strip turned out exactly how I imagined it when I was writing it. It was also WAY harder to draw than I thought it would be. I don’t know why, nothing about it was particularly difficult from a technical standpoint. Well, that’s not true – doing effects on the shot through the glass door in panel 2 was pretty labour-intensive.

EMPLOYEE OF THE WEEK:

Joe Amon is Employee of the Week! He gets the fancy parking space next to the door. There’s going to be a bit of a revamp coming to the Patreon, as I endeavour to provide more value and some neat interactivity. If you’ve ever wanted to be drawn into a comic, maybe keep an eye on that. More on that next month, when that stuff starts being rolled out. Or just sign up now and give a few bucks to a corporate overlord that will actually notice it!

Next Week: The best chase since Bullitt. See it early on Patreon.

Toast

The other day I was re-watching Invader Zim and saw Professor Membrane’s dramatic “I’m making… TOAST!” introduction, which posting this immediately reminded me of. Because all jokes about toast are connected in the Toast Continuum.

Also, this is several hours later than normal because apparently ECCC prep just means my brain is screaming with stress at all times and every thing I realize I have to do bumps out some other thing I need to do, because apparently running a business where I also make all the products is too much for my mind to handle. Oh, and I’ve spent a good six hours trying to fix Adobe Illustrator, which decided to not work anymore. Cool. Coolcoolcool.

EMPLOYEE OF THE WEEK:

We’re back at the start of the rotation with Cait of the North. Follow her on Twitter, where she is better at promoting my comics than I am. What, putting the guy who just wants to stay at home and draw cartoon pictures all the time in charge of marketing is, perhaps, not a great business move? I don’t know what you’re talking about. You know what IS a great business move? Supporting Hell, Inc. on Patreon. It keeps me, the dumbass artist, from having to do actual business shit all the time. Instead, I can make more comics to entertain you. So, Patreon. Go do it.

Intern Stuff

I don’t know why the most influential thing to me about Invader Zim was characters picking up smaller characters by the head like they’re inanimate objects, but it was. I guess anyone with any power being an idiot, as a theme, also bled into my own work.

EMPLOYEE OF THE WEEK:

Ben Hamlin, host of the pirate-themed Pathfinder podcast Cursed, is this week’s Employee of the Week! Listen, we all know you’re on that Critical Role tip – check out somebody who doesn’t already have zillions of listeners but does great stuff anyway. If you want to be Employee of the Week, hit up the Hell, Inc. patreon and receive a shoutout/denouncement of a more popular entity within your genre. That second thing is wholly dependent on my mood at the time of writing the Employee of the Week blurb.

Next Week: Doug’s toaster knowledge is on point. Find out why on Patreon.

Shredder Sans Mutagen

Looking through the uploaded files to attach the right one made me realize that I’ve got the next month’s worth of comics done already. I haven’t had a buffer that hefty in a few months, especially during the Hockeypocalypse Kickstarter. It’s nice.

This page got a re-write while I was doing the thumbnail, because I had written a placeholder joke into the last panel and then forgot to go back and write a better punchline. I hadn’t decided how Doug was going to imagine himself killing Steve, but once I decided on an oversized shredder it let me replace the placeholder punchline with something that actually made sense. The placeholder was pretty non-sequitur, which, while I often enjoy those kinds of jokes, I don’t think work particularly well in comics. Semi-relatedly, I just saw a film at a local horror convention (shoutout to Dead By Con) that really beat non-sequiturs to death as a way to skirt issues that came up during production, which has likely lowered my opinion of non-sequiturs for the moment.

EMPLOYEE OF THE WEEK:

Robbie Dorman is Employee of the Week! He’s the host of the Simpsons Show and Serial Fanatacist podcasts, which you should go listen to. Being deeply influenced by the Simpsons as well, I support his taste in podcast topics. He also has a Patreon, perhaps consider throwing him a few bucks as well, yes? CORPORATE SYNERGY. If you want to get in on the corporate synergy, support the Hell, Inc. Patreon so I can keep using the corporate gold card.

Next Week: A real meeting of the minds. Read it early by supporting Hell, Inc. on Patreon!

Sleeve Time

This is a variation of a scene from the Hell, Inc. #2 print comic, except it looks good, because I am much better at drawing now than I was in 2010 or whenever that was. Doug and B.L. Zebub’s relationship is my favourite thing in the comic, because I love writing them together. Zebub being on weird, dumb power trips all the time and Doug just casually pointing out that they don’t make any sense is satisfying – it’s all the stuff you never actually say out loud to your dumb boss.

EMPLOYEE OF THE WEEK:

Sylvia Douglas is Employee of the Week, but she’d like you to employ her partner, Corinne Simpson, as your part-time virtual assistant! If  you want to get a shout-out, or just like Hell, Inc. and want it to stay financially viable, support the Hell, Inc. Patreon! Maybe I’ll be able to hire Corinne to do all of the day-to-day administrative junk that I hate!

Next Week: Fantasizing about murder. Read it early on Patreon!